Who says clothes aren’t a matter of life or death? In Succession they’re both
In the days after my mother’s death, I spent a lot of time online looking for shoes to wear to her funeral. Not an obvious reaction to grief. But while I had a dress – a black one with pretty red peonies that I kept rolled up in my bag when her illness began to accelerate during the summer – we were in lockdown so the shops were shut, and I wasn’t going to wear Birkenstocks. Eventually, I found some brogues on eBay and, after wiping them with Dettol, tried everything on. I looked nice, put together. But this was the problem. Looking “put together” seemed like the wrong response when I felt anything but. On the day of her funeral, I wore my mother’s navy skirt suit. It was too big and I was too hot, but for both reasons felt much more appropriate.
I was reminded of all this after watching Shiv Roy walking behind her father’s coffin in the most recent episode of Succession. Even in deep grief, she was forced to look the part: powdered nose, hair done, a black pantsuit with a Disney villain neckline and a string of establishment pearls. In short, a scion and a firebrand – not a grieving mother-to-be. Death is a great leveller until it isn’t.
Succession is not a show couched in realism, however tangible the sibling dynamics often feel. It’s a show about appearances, and within that, clothes. No one eats, shops or – despite the pregnancy – seems to have sex.
The only constant is what these awful people wear, which remains largely unchanged throughout all four seasons. Except for Shiv, who, as the only daughter of an unfathomably rich and powerful rightwinger, is under more scrutiny than most. In the first series, she was a long-haired power liberal in Fair Isle knits from H&M (H&M!) and dresses from Ted Baker. Now she is in buttoned-up Max Mara waistcoats and Ralph Lauren houndstooth jackets, betraying herself as a woman not in control, but trapped in a doom loop of familial discontent, lies and daddy issues.
The main change of course is that she’s pregnant, a fact that she has been trying to hide until now. As someone who is also pregnant, though a few weeks behind, I think managing this has been the costume department’s greatest challenge, and success. The first trimester is fine. By 20 weeks, there’s no escape. And yet no elastic waists and tent dresses for Shiv! Instead, long blazers to hide her bump, low-cut tops to distract and a clever taupe Skims bodysuit to keep that bump under wraps. Night sweats getting you down? Just tong your hair (on that – I’ve noticed continuity issues this season, with her hair going from straight to wavy mid-scene, which suggests they’re thinking about Shiv’s hair as much as I’m thinking about my own). Twitter certainly had fun mocking Shiv’s sad ponytail at Connor’s wedding. But as anyone familiar with pregnancy hormones knows, secondtrimester hair has a will of its own.
One of the hardest things for a pregnant woman to do is to confront this bodily shape shift while trying to maintain their identity. Most keep their pregnancies a secret for at least 12 weeks for fear of miscarriage or complications. These dangers are real – roughly 10% to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage – and most of us would rather not risk sharing news early only to have difficult conversations later. This silence isn’t much fun. But even after this point, the risks continue and can be compounded by judgment and career retaliation – all while you try not to vomit on the hour. In the case of Shiv, that judgment is coming from her family, the tabloids and all those people who told her she’d be a terrible mother.
Roman’s joke about her weight is the least of it.
Caught between these duelling realities, it’s little wonder she’s gone turbo-Tom-Ford-Girlboss. It’s also little wonder she’s aligned herself with an alt-billionaire from Sweden: a country where parental rights are light years ahead of the US. The many cultural differences between Alexander Skarsgård’s Lukas Matsson and the Roy brothers are also signalled in their clothes, which set the scene long before they begin negotiations (though you could definitely envision Kendall wearing the Swede’s gold bomber jacket from the Tailgate party during his existential phase in season two).
The overall aesthetic of the show has been distilled into “stealth wealth”. This aggressively bland look, which loosely translates as “cashmere and baseball caps indoors”, is more of a nebulous marketing term than an actual trend – to me, it looks like expensive normcore. For Shiv, though, it’s become a uniform and a life raft, a way of showing her skin remains in the game even if there’s a baby the length of a carrot growing within it.
We dismiss clothing as superficial but it often says a lot about who we are or at least who we want to be. This is the paradox of fashion. And it is particularly true for women, especially when we are trying to keep a handle on the vast movements of life and death.
Morwenna Ferrier is the Guardian’s fashion and lifestyle editor
always looks like she’s just asked a pupil: “And who do you think they’re going to believe – me or you?” Suella’s is the carefree self-satisfaction of someone convinced they can stay awful way longer than you can stay angry.
The Office for National Statistics publishes its 2022 migration figures on Thursday, with a very significant rise expected, and Braverman has for some time been regarded as searching for the right moment to leave the government so as not to be tarnished with the failure to hit targets (to say nothing of various other failures coming down the slipway). So maybe the speeding story emerging now is Suella’s intricately plotted long-range attempt at suicide-by-cop and being fired from Rishi Sunak’s cabinet, having spent much of her time in it trying to make her predecessor, Priti Patel, look like Gary Lineker.
That said, other far-fetched conspiracy theories are available. Tory Clouseau Miriam Cates MP yesterday declared: “It’s no coincidence that someone has leaked this private information in the same week that Suella has publicly spoken out about the need to reduce legal migration.” She’s literally the home secretary, but OK. Strong words from Miriam, who spent some of last week informing the NatCon conference that thanks to “cultural Marxism”, raising the birth rate was the most pressing policy issue of the generation. After a full 13 years in power, it seems like a bit of a self-own to find members of this Conservative party ranting about the low birth rate. You’d think they’d avoid drawing attention to having helped established an atmosphere of such profound hopelessness that young people judge it simply unwise to continue the species.
Whichever way you slice it, the whole affair does seem to be being oddly stage-managed by Braverman’s spads, or simply lied about, when that’s easier. Even when definitively rumbled on the story, her team seem to have pushed her to talk about it in the past continuous. On at least five occasions yesterday, Braverman chose to deploy the weird formulation “last summer I was speeding”, which makes it sounds like a phase rather than a single incident. You know the sort of thing: “Last summer I was speeding, I was cutting class, I was wearing my hair too long, I was spending a lot of time hooked up to a daiquiri machine. I was, in short, a hot mess.” As I say, I think I’d have gone with something simpler, like: “Last summer I got a speeding ticket.” But who are we to judge the genius strategists of the Suella Braverman war machine?
As for the question of whether Rishi Sunak will sack Suella, this feels like something we’ll be able to consider at leisure. The PM has spent the past few days debating whether or not to launch an ethics probe into her conduct. That would seem to be an exercise with about as much point as launching a survivors’ probe of the wreck of the Titanic. Mate, I don’t think they’re going to find any ethics down there. Then again, the sheer number of probes into the home secretary’s antics that have been called for, even over the past year, suggest some kind of specialist Suella unit may be the answer. Working title: Braverman Two Zero.
Ultimately, one of the main reasons that Sunak acceded to the post of prime minister at the second time of asking last year was that he won the coveted … sorry, I can’t believe I’m going to have to type these words … the coveted Suella Braverman endorsement. Yup, that was the reality – try not to choke on it. At the time, Braverman backing Sunak was regarded as the clincher that definitively headed off the possibility of Boris Johnson making the least welcome comeback to British life since measles. You may recall, Suella was in the middle of a spell in the political wilderness, which we can regard as very modern in that it lasted precisely six calendar days, and saw her restored to precisely the same office of state she had vacated less than one big shop ago.
The very idea that Braverman could once again be embroiled in a potential breach of the ministerial code, and indeed it not even be her first potential breach since re-assuming office … well, who among us? Who among us could have possibly foreseen it?
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
This June, Marina Hyde will join fellow columnists at three Guardian Live events in Leeds, Brighton and London. Readers can join these events in person and the London event will be livestreamed